While the social aspect of marketing has been at the forefront, email marketing is still a highly effective form of marketing. People check their email more than once a day and utilize it as their main form of contact. However, to reap the benefits you have to choose the best layout for your campaign intent.

This means avoiding the use of a standard template. BounceCreative.com suggests, “If your leads can’t distinguish your email marketing template from your competitors’ email marketing templates, what makes you think they will remember you when they are ready to make a purchase?” There are three main layout forms to consider.

Editorial

If your email campaign requires more informative text than promotional photos and links, editorial will be the layout for you. However, email marketing campaigns often fail because the newsletters are not appealing to customers; as far as they’re concerned, it’s just another spam email. So, be sure to create a template with at least two columns to split up the text; this makes it more appealing and less daunting. There are two types of editorial layouts.

Short – This is beneficial for quick announcements: giveaways, short term sales or new products. It contains minimal text, with vibrant colors and photos taking dominance.

Long – For a monthly newsletter, long editorial is the most common format. Break up content, however, with photos, links, etc.

Promotional

If your aim is to create buzz around your products, then you’ll want to utilize a promotional layout. A promotional campaign will benefit from short, vibrant layouts. This will not only enhance the products you’re promoting but also make the email appealing to your eager-to-delete customers. There are two ways to tackle a promotional layout.

Branded – While all your emails should be well branded, be sure that the colors and style of a promo newsletter is tied tightly to your brand. You want your products to stick out as your products, not blend in with the sea of other promotional emails.

A Call to Action – Make your call to action the focus; it should be large and prominent. To make the most of an overtly promotional email, you have to get your customers moving. Send them to your Facebook page to get a discount, for example.

Catalog

A great way to take advantage of a large email campaign is to infuse products, catalog style, into each email. Not only does this create more awareness of new and old products, but it encourages your busy customers to purchase then and there. The bare bones of this layout will be grid-based – breaking up the photos and content to make it easily digested.

Targeted – A catalog is an excellent way to target certain customers. Create a catalog email for your young, female customers, and a separate one for your middle aged men. Match products with customers for better conversion, and cater the overall style to theirs.

Campaign Specific – If you’re running a specific promotion or campaign, design a layout around that. Avoid columns and go for a grid style; product on the left, short clip of text on the right.

Creating a layout that stands out from the rest will be the best way to see ROI. While you can utilize all these layouts at any point in your campaign, make sure you optimize each one by pairing it with the right content.

Comments

Don Hanson

Jul 02 2012, 07:41 PM

Much of your advice should also be applied to Benchmark's template offerings.
Branding is much to difficult to maintain. A business's colors have to be remembered (hex numbers) and applied section by section to each new template used. Available sections may change from template to template and if the same, are not presented in the same order (hierarchy)
Your template offerings could (should?) be organized into the 6 groupings.

Andy from Bechmark Email

Jul 03 2012, 04:51 PM

Good points, Don. You can save templates for future use, which would maintain your brand colors. If you'd like, you can pitch your idea in our Feature Request forum as well!